Absolute and Benchmarked Economic Voting. A Subnational Perspective on a Decade of Elections in Southern Europe

Abstract

The article analyses the fifteen elections that took place in four South-European countries -Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spainduring the 2010-2019 decade. It does so by adopting NUTS3 sub-national territories as observation units. The theoretical framework used is the classic retrospective economic vote theory, updated with a taxonomy of retrospective behaviour derived from how voters benchmark their assessment against some external reference point. While the electoral reactions of absolute economic voters depend solely on local economic conditions, benchmarking compares them with regional or national reference points, as well as diachronically with past economic performances. The results of these analyses aid understanding the economic horizons of voters, and substantiate the idea of (electoral) South-Europeanness, in a critical decade like the one covered by the article. variation of major economic and political dynamics. Next, I introduce the sub-national declination of the economic vote theory and how the idea of benchmarking helps to better distinguish different types of voting behaviours.In the empirical sections, I first present the data and model used, and then compare the empirical results of several conventional and benchmarked models. The final section reviews the findings and reflects on their meanings for regional South-European studies. Disaggregating the economic and political outlookThe world had just exited one crisisthe Great Recessionwhen it entered two new ones, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both with significant socio-economic correlates. Southern Europe did not experience even an interlude between the two emergency periods, with economic data that show scant recovery to pre-2008 levels compared to other areas within the European Union (EU). The overall number of people employed in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Cyprus and Malta reached its lowest point in 2013, almost 10% fewer than in 2007, but in 2019 the quantity was still 2 percentage points below the pre-crisis reference level. At that time, the other 22 member-states had already improved their employment rates by 8 percentage points compared to 2007, with West-European countries leading the recovery, closely followed by Nordic ones and by those in Central-Eastern Europe. Their aggregate gross domestic product recovered sooner, but while the level of Southern-Europe GDP in 2019 was only 11% higher than before the Great Recession, the rest of the EU increased its production capacity by more than 32%, this time in a reverse regional order compared to the employment rankings.At the same time, the four major South-European countries did not experience exactly the same downturn, and their markets did not react in a perfectly similar manner to the global challenges (Capriati 2019; Parker & Tsarouhas 2018). Greece was the country that paid the highest toll to the Great Recession, especially in terms of wealth reduction, and had to agree to multiple international bailout agreements and conditions (Featherstone 2011). The Italia...